Mel Johnson

Don't forget that the aforementioned Ms. Clinton is a former student of our own Victoria Leigh.

The confused period values problem was obvious even when the movie was in first run. MAD Magazine did a parody in which they mixed the screenplay with Paddy Chayefsky from 1955, and called it "El Mardi"

"Whaddaya wanna do today, Cid?"

"I dunno, whadda YOU wanna do, Mardi?"

I didn't get it then, hey, I was thirteen, but I understood later.

Ulp! For those not familiar, the New Year's Eve performance of NYCB's Nutz is sort of a closing night follies. The snowflakes sometimes come on wearing earmuffs or mittens. Once they suggested galoshes, but this was forbidden. One year, Mr. Balanchine was Drosselmeyer, and handed one of the parents a little yellow rubber duckie, instructing her to see that it was passed to a parent on the far side of the stage. While the kids mimed and danced, there was this "telephone game" going on amongst the adults, with an occasional squeak as the duckie went from one to the next. It's a good add, but let's not stop considering the show as a whole, and the implications of many different productions of it.

Of course, this thread cannot stand without an extremely favorable notice of Shaun O'Brien, who enlivened many a NYCB performance. I was under the impression that he was strictly an actor/mime until I saw him in Jacques d'Amboise's "The Chase", where, as the Duke, he danced classically for several phrases. Later, his elderly suitor in "Harlequinade" nearly made my cousin strangle with laughter as O'Brien serenaded Columbine. "This is ridiculous!" "Of course! It's supposed to be!" Dying is easy, comedy, now that's hard!

Hi, Scorpio, and welcome to Ballet Talk:

Here's a writing on Nutcracker as a whole - mostly on the original production - some years ago on our progenitor site, Ballet Alert!:

http://www.balletalert.com/ballets/19th%20...y/Nuts/Nuts.htm

Click around in there. There's a select bibliography, videography, and discography (now, alas, rather dated), but the information still holds up. If you want to copy and paste passages to this thread for discussion, fine and dandy!

Worse, it could have been about Maury Povich. Can't you see, in dance medium,

"Tyrone, you are NOT the father." (TYRONE looks angry)

"But, Maria, you are not the MOTHER, either! (TYRONE and MARIA look poleaxed)

"WHAAAA? What was all that for nine months, with the big belly and all?"

"Really bad gas."

"Well, then, who's this kid?"

"Darned if we know."

or

"LaTanya, LeRoy is the father, but he's been sleeping with your brother!"

There are worse things than Britney.

Perhaps Strauss' estate has not been insisting on the "no dance" provision, whether by court finding, or simply by having all the executors and beneficiaries dead! "Four Last Songs" has been used by a couple of choreographers since Eliot Feld tried to use it in the 80s. He wrote them in 1948, intending them for Kirsten Flagstad. The next year, he died.

You can almost hear those poor guys: "Thank God they couldn't get elephants!"

Here's an oldie but a goodie from 1998:

This is the thread viewed through the other end of the telescope. It is intended specifically for the observer of the weird and strange things that happen when Things Go Wrong. I don't mean just a dancer taking a classic three-point landing (two heels and another part of the anatomy) in the middle of a classic variation, or somebody just forgetting the choreography, but those moments when things break down utterly and irretrievably and the only answer is the curtain or a blackout so that the stage manager can clear off the mess with a snowplow. Second-hand entries are OK, too, as in the lead for the topic.

In 1978, the Not-Terribly-Good Club of Great Britain (honest!) reported on a performance of Kenneth MacMillan's "Mayerling". At one point in the performance, a layer of the skirt of Lynn Seymour's costume came loose. David Wall, dancing Archduke Rudolf, gallantly tried to tear the offending textile away, but only succeeded in pulling more loose. Seymour dragged her new train behind her, but eventually it started to wrap her up, and more was coming loose with every movement. Audience excitement rose as they could see more and more of Seymour! Wall struggled valiantly, at first attempting to partner through the gauze, but he finally ended up partnering the bandages. After awhile, a viewer reported, "they looked like two piles of rags possessed by the Devil". A critic reported that he had often seen the tragedy of Mayerling through tears, but never of this sort! An opportunity for a timely exit saved the hapless dancers from a further exercise in Murphy's Law (If things can possibly go wrong, they will) and stage entropy (left to themselves, things will go from bad to worse). How about it? Any great tales of disaster onstage? (I'd appreciate it if stories where people end up getting hurt could be kept to a minimum, but they have to be allowed as part of disaster stories.)

I don't know what Dukas' problem was, but Strauss was a composer with a lot of crotchets (and quavers ). He hated tenors, so Octavian is a mezzo trouser role in Rosenkavalier. Christopher Tolkien is a kind of guy who is constantly on hair-trigger about his father's work. He once wanted to enter suit on a matter, and was advised by his solicitor that he'd be suing himself. The discovery phase of trial should at least demonstrate whether there is a shortage in the royalties to the Estate. 7.5% of gross is a rather unusually large compensation, but we'll see.

Not an actual disaster, but awfully distracting. In La Sylphide, the Sylph has to go into the hearth and disappear up the chimney for a time, hauled up by burly stagehands. The Sylph was Martine van Hamel. Into the fireplace she went, sous-sus, and up she went -- halfway, and stuck there. In came Effy, in came the wedding guests, in came Gurn, in came Madge, and nobody was really paying attention to them. They were fascinated by the feet in the flue! At first, they were very decorous feet, in a cou de pied position, but after awhile, they had to switch positions, as cramp was setting in. Then they flexed, then the ankles got a little itchy, and the audience was convulsed. Madge could have danced the can-can wearing red bloomers and playing the sousaphone and nobody would have paid attention. The stagehands eventually freed the ballerina from the hold of the chimney and away went the feet, much to the disappointment of many in the crowd.

If you access the board via Google, it may select "outline" option as default.

Well, Daniil may be a bit small for one of Tolkien's Elves, but then he definitely could be a Baggins, who are rumored to be part Elvish, anyway!

We'll have to see, as the case proceeds, and I agree that a court is the best place to sort this kind of thing out. I may be a bit biased on the question, as I have some experience in how tetchy Estates can be about intellectual property. Ever see a ballet set to Richard Strauss' "Four Last Songs" performed in SILENCE because the Strauss estate enforced the composer's Curse of the Cat People from his will, forbidding any use of his music which he had not approved for dance use during his lifetime ever to be used for dance as long as the Estate had force? Dukas had a similar provision in his will.

I can't speak for anybody else, but the Ratmansky succession looks more like "business as usual" not only for a Russian company, but for many western ones, too. Don't forget that a few years ago, the Danes were going through a chaotic time of finding a durable balletmaster.

That's "our" Daniil for you. He's a bit of a Tolkien Elf!

See especially Leigh's post #30 on that thread.

I still remember his de profundis cry to God, "Whatsamatter, ya don't like musical comedy?"

Well done.

May he have eternal rest,

May light perpetual shine upon him.

(I can hear him now, "How am I supposed to get any rest with all this damn light?!")

Makeup of the Medieval period tended to be Not Good For You. Lip rouge was often mercuric oxide in tallow or beeswax. Eyeliner was kohl, antimony sulfide, which is less toxic than mercury, but a heavy metal nonetheless. And we won't even go on about foundation, which could have been almost exactly the same recipe as leaded house paint!

Ballet is one of those things which are best considered as "Gesamtkunstwerke". It is a successful blending of decor, costume, music and choreography. It might be possible to make a "laboratory" production of Sleeping Beauty, but even with skeleton sets and costumes (and I think tutus would be necessary for the line they provide), it would make a mighty expensive lab! You can see the nerves and muscles of the choreography in ways that usually only dancers can see from rehearsal, but it's likely to miss the "magic" imperative to a "ballet-féerie", which is Beauty's genre.

I don't like ballet competitions. In fact, I just about hate them.

They encourage Wretched Excess, with women doing triple and more fouettés, and men doing triple tours en l'air and braces of entrechats-huits, and other acrobatics of dubious utility to the art.

Now, if the selection choices were limited to legato variations, it might be a revealing exercise in exposing technical expertise, or other.

Now, other forms? Knock yourself out.

Are there Modern competitions?

Was it Mirella Freni, who, taking her final leap off the wall in her farewell performance of Tosca, bounced back up into audience view with a very surprised moue on her face? I remember the debate afterward, among those who claimed she meant to do that as sort of "closing night follies" and those who disagreed.

The 1954 costume was made from what I think was probably war surplus "parachute silk" (nylon) which is nearly transparent when lit from the back, but when lit from the front is opaque. There was a practical reason for that. You didn't want airborne troops landing on one another's canopies while in fall, but you wanted to make a more confusing silhouette for riflemen on the ground to keep them from picking off your troops in the air. It also sews very well, making tight, fray-resistant seams, for obvious reasons. I wonder if the lighting of the ballet made use of the translucency, suggesting Mac was in a super-hero "shape suit"?

At least Andrew Carnegie saw it as his obligation to give away as much of his money as he could before he died. Unfortunately for that plan, he was making more than he could ever give away, and sometimes his gifts were very quixotic - viz: Building a lake for Princeton University to improve the quality of the crew team when the University's President (Woodrow Wilson) wanted a new Sciences building.

Then there's Balanchine's "Opus 34". Schoenberg's "Music for the Cinema". There's a lost Balanchine that can STAY lost.

About twenty years ago, I came up with an economic warning sign that only seems to have become more severe as time advances. We see the phenomenon of the children of the well-off performing for audiences made up of the really wealthy, who can afford multiple subscriptions to prime seats, and make donations to support the companies. The Ford Foundation Scholarships of the 60s actually tried to work against this trend, and they were still going when the first oil embargo in the 70s ate up that disposable corporate income. I don't advocate returning to the days when ballet companies were peopled with orphans, or worse, serfs, but you have to ask, "Is this economic, social and cultural progress?" (Mind you, I would make THE WORLD'S WORST Communist and a pretty bad Socialist.)